ANZ in the Community

ANZ had the privilege of supporting a range of community projects throughout Australia, the bank seeks to build trusting and respectful relationships with the communities in which it operates. This interview with Brian Hartzer, Group Managing Director of ANZ Personal Division explores how ANZ differentiates itself as a corporate citizen and how the broader community benefits.

Interviewer: Brian, ANZ has quite a unique attitude to the place of corporations in the community, can you tell us about it?

Brian: Big companies play an important role in the community and therefore they have to act with integrity as well as giving something back to society. So at ANZ it's about thinking about the way we go about what we do and making sure our employees feel good about working with us and that our customers and community are pleased to have you as part of the community.

Interviewer: I hear ANZ also allows its staff time off work to take part in community events through volunteering?

Brian: We do. Every staff member gets a day of volunteering leave paid per year and we let them use that any way they like. So they can dedicate their time to things that matter to them but also we find that they will often group up and work on particular issues so in our mortgage businesses as an example we are a major supporter of Habitat for Humanity and our people in our mortgage business work to build houses for the underprivileged. In fact I used my volunteer leave myself to do that last year. I spent the day lying on my back under a house stapling insulation up under the floor but it's a very satisfying thing and it makes you feel good about where you work.

Interviewer: Can you give us some examples of the sorts of projects ANZ is involved in on a local level?

Brian: Yes well we believe that the local community angle was really quite important part. Often big corporation's focus on big high profile things and we realise that social responsibility about local communities. So we started with something last year called ANZ Blue Week and this is a national initiative where each branch around Australia chooses a local charity to support and then they spend the week doing fund raising activity while also introducing new customers to ANZ and this year we raised over $440,000 for local charities that the branch has nominated. There is another program called Seeds of Renewal which is particularly focused on rural and regional areas and we started that three years ago and what happens there is we give each local branch a amount of money that we want them to donate to a relevant local community charity. For example this year we funded eighty three different projects around rural communities with an overall value of about $450,000. And these are terrific things and example is that we funded for about $10,000 there was an environmental education centre for a primary school children in the Albury/Wodonga area which would not have happened without that grant. And we do other things like supporting local tourism repainting pools and you know all sorts of things but it's the things that are really relevant in the local community and look we don't look for lots of national awareness about that its just something about helping connecting our people with the people in the community.

Interviewer: And the community minded approach extends in to some unique financial services too.

Brian: Well I think the starting point for ANZ was thinking well as a large company how can we make an impact more broadly in the community. And we decided to focus on the issue of financial literacy which was something that was very important to lots of people across society and so we sponsored some research about the level of financial literacy in the Australian scene and out of that grew a number of initiatives such as our money minded programme, which is one of the most highly regarded initiatives in Australia and we also developed Saver Plus. Which was a programme for helping underprivileged people get out of the poverty trap and start learning to save money with a match saving programme, so we matched the money that they did. And we worked with the Brotherhood of St Laurance to launch that.

Interviewer: Brian it has been great to hear about the things ANZ is doing within the community.

Brian: Thanks very much.

Interviewer: My pleasure thank you.